Category: Ozzie Smith Blog

I thought it was a good idea for players to be able to decide when the new ball would come into play, and I wanted to reward the teams that worked together so that the ball would come out of the bumper far enough so that the player who produced the ball wouldn’t be able to catch it right away. Hello, my name is Ozzie Smith and I am the designer and programmer of DunkRatz, a local 2-4 player multiplayer game where each player is a mouse on a team fighting for a cheese ball to feed “his” team’s enormous baby mouse to get a point. In this iteration we have a force field around the target as soon as it was selected, so we could make the white cheese a little faster, but it seemed fairer to me because no one can “catch” the cheese ball once it spawns. A problem with the bumper was that in the end it wasn’t much else to automatically hit the ball in the middle, because if the players knew what was going on, they would keep the ball where it was going to be hit. Since the cheese ball can spawn anywhere, we thought we should give the players enough time to reposition themselves, but sometimes there was too much downtime. In basketball, the affected team has the right to control the ball from their side of the field, but this wouldn’t work with Dunkirk Ratz either, because the dynamic goal positions mean that no team really has a “side” of the field. I thought it was very easy to try to score a goal directly with a loaded ball and that this was the best strategy in the game. So I added a “bumper” in the middle of the card that had to be touched by a player to get a new ball. The first thing we tried to do was to hide where the bullet would fall, but show the bullet that was fired from the bumper to the spawning position. As a result, a second bumper and a spawning area for the ball were added, and now the teams could no longer save the individual spawning area for the ball. The spawning time on the force field was good, but we felt the real problem was that we just didn’t know where the cheese ball was going to spawn. Our design philosophy, which we inevitably came back to over and over again, was “to make them dive in”. “The last iteration uses bows, but the bullet lands with a big explosion that takes everything away. In the football or rocket competition, the action stops and the game resumes: everyone returns to their starting position and the ball is brought to the centre of the field.